This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture where you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music (including of course Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen), film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of…
Culture
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How a penniless immigrant named Igor skyrocketed to Broadway and Hollywood fame
Mike Nichols: A Life By Mark Harris Penguin Press, 688 pages, $29.99 After six days on the S.S. Bremen in 1939, the little Berliner fleeing the Third Reich disembarked in New York. Igor Michael Peschowsky was seven, “a self-contained, unsmiling child,” and bald as an egg – the unexpected result of a whooping-cough vaccine. At…
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How celebrated illustrator Peter Sís found a Holocaust hero in his own backyard
The day after Donald Trump won the 2016 election, the author and illustrator Peter Sís met with his editor to discuss a new book. The former president’s rise was already drawing comparisons to the crises of the 20th century. Still, Sís couldn’t have predicted that he would finish his latest work, a children’s tale of…
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Art An artist in exile talks Tu B’Shvat tarot and working from her childhood home
During the pandemic, Jessica Tamar Deutsch has been considering exile as she relearns how to paint. Specifically, she’s been thinking about the title character in “The Lost Princess,” a story by Rabbi Nachman, the mystic founder of the Breslov Hasidic movement, about a young woman who disappears from her home after displeasing her kingly father….
The Latest
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She didn’t go to Hebrew school, but she she made an extremely accurate movie about it — a conversation with Olivia Peace
The most important scenes in “Tahara” take place where the best shul drama goes down: the ladies’ lounge. Possibly the most important amenity a synagogue can offer, the ladies’ lounge features way too many wicker baskets, a selection of castoff artwork incorporating the phrase “tikkun olam” and a well-worn couch conducive to dawdling and dishing…
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Meet Jon Ossoff’s Jewish predecessors from the South
Jon Ossoff is the first Jew to be elected to the Senate from the Deep South since before the Reconstruction. But who were these Civil War era Jews who came before him? They’re so far in the past, I was surprised to hear there had ever been a Jewish senator from the South; I had…
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How winning a Nobel Prize helped me to find my roots
I was hiking deep in the woods near Czestochowa, Poland, and beginning to worry that our guide had gotten us lost. I was accompanied by my wife Lynn, my cousins Ellen and Judy, and Judy’s husband, Ivan. Supposedly, we were looking for my family’s roots, but I doubted we were going to find them this…
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Film & TV For Paul Newman’s 96th birthday, his lost cinematic masterpiece
Editor’s Note: Paul Newman would have celebrated his 96th birthday today. To commemorate that date, we’re taking another look at this essay about the Anton Chekhov film he directed on the stage of a Yiddish theater. Paul Newman directed a pioneering, independent film shot at a Yiddish theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and you’ve…
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A hit Israeli TV show is finally in English. But will it translate?
“The New Black,” which goes by the name “Shababnikim” in its original Hebrew, was a hit in Israel when it came out in 2017;. Airing on Israel’s HOT network, its views outstripped even popular foreign shows such as “Game of Thrones.” Now it is being released in the U.S., with English subtitles, accessible to a…
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A 1939 satire critiques shtetl life — before it disappeared forever
Depictions of shtetl life — with their pogroms, close knit community and at times provincial ways — invite nostalgia and criticism all at once. Many of the shtetls’ most famous chroniclers in fiction were also moralists of the old world, critiquing the pieties and superstitions of the Pale of Settlement, often from the safe distance…
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Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem was beautiful and mighty — no matter what your religion may be
At Joe Biden’s glorious inauguration, our first National Youth Poet Laureate, Amanda Gorman, recited her poem for the occasion, “The Hill We Climb.” It was beautiful and mighty and fit the occasion. Yet a column in The Forward criticized one fleeting passage in the poem, in which Gorman quoted the Biblical prophecy that “that everyone…
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How an Orthodox Jewish refugee became a theater and opera legend
The Australian opera and theater director Elijah Moshinsky, who died on Jan. 14 of COVID-19 complications at age 75, was celebrated for his onstage collaborations with superstar singers from Luciano Pavarotti to Plácido Domingo, and stage legends from Helen Mirren to Judi Dench. Yet Moshinsky’s most ardent lifelong inspiration was arguably drawn from his Jewish…
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